Nerima Makhondo aka ApodaSpark (Xe/They) is an Intergalactic-Cyborg-Octo-Fairygod being. Xe is an any-media artist whose foundation is performance that is rooted in East African indigenous performance practice of folk songs. Nerima is currently based in Kenya.
Solo Performance Video work
Digital Collage Music
Xe makes work to free themselves and the collective consciousness. Through their work, they ‘traffic in the imaginary’ to generate new liberated ways to confront oppressive systems. They nurtured their performance talent from childhood at church plays and inter-school music and drama festivals. Xe ‘lives art and arts life’ using their body as a site to enmesh the two. The line between what is ‘real’ and what is ‘performance’ is deeply embedded in their work not only as an artistic question but as a practice also.
Their work uses an intersectional lens of gendered identities, trauma, mental health and self-expression to explore black political questions. They employ digital tools and indigenous spiritual technologies in their practice. Xe mixes media as it expands their approach allowing for new conversations to emerge as the forms interact.
ApodaSpark is an intergalactic being from the Cosmos Redshift 7 Galaxy landed on earth by way of East Africa (banyala tribe). They spent their childhood within Kenya, immigrated to New York for college at Columbia University where they graduated with a Bachelors in Drama and Performance Studies in 2019 and moved back to Kenya after.
They are currently transition to full-time creative practice in performance and music.
For their Solo Performance thesis at Barnard College (CC’19), Nerima Makhondo (fka Rũgũrũ Karira) performed a piece entitled ‘Four women, if you know you know’ (an Ode to Nina Simone). This 15 minute performance explored how Black Women have engaged with the freedom movement in contemporary African political conversations.
Under the guidance of Prof. Kyle deCamp, Nerima weaved a piece that highlighted two contemporary African women directly opposed their governments and faced violent responses; Stella Nyanzi (Uganda) and Joana Mamombe (Zimbabwe). Additionally, they used three identified Womanist virtues; Unshouted Courage, Quiet Grace and Invisible Dignity to create the characters and added an additional virtue, Radical Rudeness. The piece uses collected excerpts from Alexis Pualine Gumbs’ poetry, Stella Nyanzi’s poetry, Ntozake Shange’s book Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, Joana Mamombes speeches and Banyala war songs (from my Auntie Bertha) to weave an intricate narrative spotlighting black women’s encounters with political violence and further than that, through integrated spellwork, give instructions for healing.
“I want to hold a space both spiritually and physically using my body to the souls of black women that I have encountered in one way or another and those that I have not to celebrate them. Within my piece, I want to bring to the fore the spiritual and physical tactics that have been applied to preserve our existence and ensure survival.” - Rũgũrũ Karira CC’19
In the performance, Nerima uses performance techniques such as their drumming, costume changes, spell work, folk dancing, stage demarcation among other tools to set ‘conditions’ for their four characters in order to differentiate the virtues and tell the story.
CW: partial nudity from min. 14:20
If you listen closely, The road sounds like an ocean. Look keenly, Grass rustling warns of a predator. And they are true and false... as sight and senses often are. The ventriloquist is the wind, both present and absent. I have felt a lack of wind several before, the world was spinning and the sky was the bottom. Is what i saw when i lost breath. i wondered to myself, how does wind transmogrify?
In your lungs, blood and bones? between leaves in the phloem? squeezing wings and paddling waves? i d bet you wind travels fastest the pace of spirits
we all hear the ventriloquist’s sounds. Do you have some wind in you too?
inStillness is keen on noticing the spirits that live parallel to our own. It asks of you to see yourself in place, horizontal to the beings around you. To consider that ‘life’ passes through us all and is not a ‘gift’ awarded to only humans. It wants you to see the birds, the dogs, the cows, the leaves, the flowers, the moon and remember that they too, speak with the land. They too have their rituals of being that have kept them and have in turn kept us in being-ship. It urges you to be still. The piece contains a poem written by Nerima and words from their late grandmother (2020) Lay Canon Mama Teresa Akumu Olayo.
The piece was part of a two channel installation for a group exhibit called 'Ancestral Technologies' at munyu space in Nairobi May 2024.
Video work visual prompt:
The more I reach out for stillness
The more you stare into stillness
Stillness in solitude stillness in company
Watching stillness…
This piece brings together three poems that I wrote during a time I spent sitting with my experience of having loved ones souls’ released from this plane. I was trying to understand death from different perspectives. I wanted to translate my experience at mortuaries, funerals, gravesites where I saw multiple souls moving around. Places where the veil feels thinner* and show through the poems my internal contemplations in those spaces.
The piece was part of a two channel installation for a group exhibit called 'Ancestral Technologies' at munyu space in Nairobi May 2024.
Grief is selfish it takes two times thirty eight thousand to the power of n. Each death has its own flavour
You ve seen one, too many youve not seen any but one.
Grief is tethered to your artery
I sit and think about its viscosity
In (m)(y)(our) blood
How long do the dead keep their blood?
It must be somewhere between my will to live and grief’s wake.
It must be slow dryin thick red with shades of glitter blood. Sips through casket cracks blood. itching blood
Grief transmogrifies
“I last saw her...”. To “never”
Songs to sorrow
Pictures to pain
To be grieving, you must master its breeze it bites and blows your wound, a doctor
It sharpens your senses.
It porcupine-prickLes
Fire supposed to clean like water
They are not so different, them two
They both flow.
Did i tell u the story
How the fire spread in the forest?
The fire flooded
Flooding fire
We were swept by fire
Our hearts
Are on fire
i have been holding the moon on my chest, not quite like Indigo in her mouth, but, i’ve been thinking about death.
“I saw it die. I felt it die. It went out like a match in a sudden vanishing of pain. Its life flared up, then went out.”
About the show:
Indigenous spiritual practices believe that the deceased spend their afterlife on the earth. The land is a resting place for those who came before us, if the resources we use to build our technologies are obtained from the land, then technology can be a resting place for the departed. Ancestral Technologies is an installation and public programme which navigates the liminal spaces between past, present, and future, weaving together threads of ancestral wisdom with contemporary digital tools.
The show was at at munyu space in Nairobi May 2024.
Nerima Exhibited presented a two-channel video projection (img.1&2) on a double layer of translucent sheers. The sheers created a corridor that had a ‘veil-like’ experience called the memory(all) space(img.3) which led to an altar installation at the end(img.4) with a spell and writing material for visitors to have their own memorial to commune with their ancestral spirits(img.4).
The memory(all) space was meant to recreate the feeling of environments where ‘the veil’ between living and dead is thinnest. Visitors were directed to start by watching the videos and reading the accompanying poems then walking to the altar for their own experience.
